What is rhetoric?

What is rhetoric?  Now that we have gone through many exercises helping us to use rhetoric to strengthen our arguments, this is much easier to answer.  Rhetoric is the way that words and ideas are expressed in an effective manner, to make the author’s point as clear as it can be.  There are many means of which rhetoric can be used, like speech, writing, through pictures, and so on.



                  At the beginning of the semester, we defined rhetoric as “the art of effective expression.”  I believe that this is still a nice definition for rhetoric. This definition is shows the full essence of what rhetoric means - it is clear and concise, meaning that it gets the point across well.

As the course evolved, we made the definition of rhetoric turn more towards argumentation and how effective argumentation is essential if you want what you are fighting for to be persuasive.  We learned about ethos, pathos, and logos, which are the different appeals to an audience. They have been useful for when we are crafting our arguments, to realize that we must take into consideration who our audience is and the most effective way to reach out to them.  This was useful in both writing and Fight Club.   In writing, we were writing with a larger audience, and had to anticipate that.  Something that really showed this was the blog post about the attacks on New York City on September 11th. We had to think about how writing an essay about September 11th would be perceived according to the audience that would be reading it. In Fight Club, we had to deal with a person who was directly and immediately going against the point of view that we were actively trying to get them to agree with.

As I am procrastinating to write this, I am sitting at the SEC Championship game, of The University of Florida versus The University of Alabama.  The two slogans for these teams are "Gator Bait" and "Roll Tide."  As I'm sitting here waiting for the game to start, I am thinking about how these are two good examples of rhetoric. Although this is an unconventional way of looking at rhetoric, I think that is a good example. With regards to both, these two slogans are known nationwide, and I would make the bold assumption that most Americans know what these two mean and what they are referring to. These two universities have used their large presence in the sports world to make themselves known to an entire nation.   The two slogans are simple, yet very effective and impactful. They have used these two words, and have turned them into something that have changed a nation. I think that this is a really good example of rhetoric and shows how the definition is useful.

In conclusion, I think that the first definition of rhetoric that we saw was the most accurate one that we have come across in the semester, and provides for the strongest meaning of the word.